I'm spending the next three days at SPIN - the Speculation and Innovation conference. Not a long way to travel as it's literally just held outside my office door here at QUT. The subtitle for SPIN is 'applying practice-led research in the creative industries', and so it's mainly dealing with the question of recognising creative practice as research - an important issue for the Creative Industries Faculty in particular, but beyond this for creative practitioners throughout Australia and the world.
We're now starting the first keynote session which will set the theme for the conference; it will be delivered by Arun Sharma, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research & Commercialisation at QUT after an official welcome by Rod Wissler, Director of Research and Research Training. Arun speaks on competitive advantage in the globalised research environment. He notes that from the perspective of commercialisation of research there exists a hierarchy of impact, which determines the public governmental perception of researchers - and he also reminds us that internationally this impact will be determined increasingly in the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese markets. Success and impact in cutting-edge fields also determines the quality of life for a country's population, of course - and these fields now stretch well beyond pure science and technology. Australia in particular may not be able to compete in these fields alone, given the current economic climate. It may need to seek its successes in innovation rather than manufacturing and service, for example - exploiting what Arun calls its domain knowledge in the fields where it is a leader (he mentions mining management software and bionic ear implants for example) but leaving other fields to those countries which are leading there.
